Trying to decide between the two. I feel that I would enjoy marketing and the work life balance is better as I understand, which is very important to me. I spent 4 years in the military, so being able to enjoy my life is a top priority. I am interested in finance, but I don’t want to end up working 90 hours a week just for the money. I don’t mind making less when I graduate of it means a better life. I’m also confident that my work ethic will provide opportunities for higher pay quickly.
I am attending Baruch in there business school Zicklin. Zicklin is known for their accounting and finance, so that makes me feel like I may be better off doing finance. A question that I have is if I did finance and double minor in marketing and law, how easy would it be to get into a different field (like marketing) and vice versa? Any advice is appreciated.
There is a really big range of careers both in marketing and finance that will have varying degrees of work life balance and required skills. With finance, if you are looking at jobs such as banking, trading, or asset management, the hours will definitely be longer particularly during your first few years. If you are looking more towards compliance or risk then you can enjoy pretty normal hours but definitely at lower pay than front office positions.
While most people don’t think of marketing as having the same varying degree of options in entry pay and work life balance it is becoming more of an option with the rise of tech companies and comp sci integration. You could pursue “softer” more sales oriented careers which are typically lower base pay with compensation tied to your deal pipeline. You could also pursue a career in quantitative marketing which is at the other end of the spectrum where entry level salaries will be similar to that of front office finance careers. This typically requires skill sets that are also gained from Comp Sci, Statistics, or Econometrics however and doesn’t necessarily require a marketing major despite being in marketing. You could also pursue something in the middle such as market research, product marketing, or consumer marketing.
I majored in finance & management and interned in real estate pe, then ended up in market research and am now in quant marketing so I get the polarizing struggle. Zicklin has a pretty good finance program especially in the city which can’t hurt during recruiting season. The thing with marketing recruiting is that most teams are relatively small and experienced (unless you are looking agency side) so they don’t really have recruiting events the same way finance pulls in a class of candidates every year. It can either hurt or help you since it forces you seek the opportunities but lowers the amount of competition.
If you majored in finance you could end up in marketing with some effort but it would definitely be more difficult vice versa. In my opinion the law minor wouldn’t really help you in either case so I would probably just look to double major in finance and marketing if possible or look into statistics/comp sci.
Thanks for your response. The problem is that Baruch doesn’t offer double majors, at least in Zicklin, and business majors are required to take one lib arts minor. Law and policy was something that I thought might interest me, but I can always change it down the road. I have some connections in the investment/banking world in NYC which is why this is such a tough decision. Ultimately, I don’t know if I would enjoy crunching numbers all day.
Have you considered management or economics majors? The professional connections shouldn’t be deciding your academic curriculum, that should be based on your personal interest. If you don’t have familiarity with either field then take a few courses in both and see which ones intrigues you more.
Would a management degree allow me to go into either field? I feel like management is a very general degree, but then again, I haven’t really considered and researched it. I’ve taken some economics courses, and I didn’t really enjoy them. I guess I’ll just have to take a marketing and finance class and see what fits best. Thank you again for your opinions.
Management is kind of in between finance & marketing in terms of use of qual/quant methods for most career options but it wouldn’t really let you pursue careers in finance since you wouldn’t receive the education in learning financial modeling. My advanced management courses actually did involve some financial modeling, but it would have been extremely difficult had I not double majored in finance & management.
Do some research into finance, management, and marketing careers and if you still don’t know which interests you the most, take the introductory courses.
I agree that the best think you can do is to take some classes in both marketing and finance and see where your interests and aptitudes lie. If you can, I would also make an appointment with the career placement office to see where people with both majors end up and how successful they are in the job market.